Report To The Stakeholders

[Steve Jackson]

Thanks for comments.

Foreign sales of PDFs: I don't know! And I would like to. We'll see how well that is tracked. Thank you for the question.

PDFs in general: Yes, we got a breakout on e23 yesterday afternoon, and the numbers were impressive. If we conclude that they're all valid, e23 gets added to the "why it was a good year" bullet points. I have some remaining questions about our costs. Sales were definitely strong, though!

[hcobb]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

Foreign sales of PDFs: I don't know! And I would like to. We'll see how well that is tracked.

I bought a PDF while in India.

If you just checked by your payment gateway provider or the e23 customer logs it would show as an American customer.

However if you checked the httpd logs from e23 it would show an Indian client IP. (There are bunches of tools that can work offline to turn httpd logs into client browsing data mine gold.)

Some online stores have objected to this mismatch as this is a common sign of overseas identity theft and some credit card companies have called us on this sort of mismatch.

I'm back in the USA (recovering from life critical but fake Indian drugs...) for a while so I need to update my profile.

[GoodGame]

Congrats on a good year.

As a GURPS-only fan, I want to say thanks for the radical redesign of Pyramid, though I'm sorry it's in the red. The redesign and change of tempo was an excellent decision in terms of improving the style and content of Pyramid. I kind of agree that 6months free was over-generous. Three months has convinced me that it's a good deal and the content is excellent now.
I hope you can use it as a tool to get the public interested in GURPS and E23. Possibly to this end, consider marketing Pyramid through other electronic sellers (e.g. RPGNOW) ? An annual free issue might be a good draw in the future as well.

I'm also impressed with the return to quality boardgames. I think with the knowledge you've gained from publishing, you'll be sucessful in pursuing future such projects, and perhaps help other successful games from other companies, make it to boxed board game form (for a share of the pie, o'course). And I still think board-game for GURPS might help penetrate the brick-and-mortar chain bookstores (I'm sure Munchkin already has market share that way, just suggesting GURPS might achieve such as well). And no doubt an improved OGRE and Carwars and Illuminati would be appreciated.

Good luck for the new year, and hoping for new games!

[David Johansen]

Well, one interesting development in the industry over the last year has me thinking. The advent of hard plastic historical miniatures sets. Yeah, I've got a soft spot for an action figure creation set, sure, but looking at the amount of variety Wargames Factory can cram onto a very small sprue has me thinking it wouldn't be unreasonable expensive to do a small set of sprues to cover a wide range of possibilities.

Separate heads arms and bodies on a sprue with four bodies and no extra parts would give a range of 272 possibilities assuming the parts were all compatible. They could even peg together if the figures were blocky enough. That would be lots of spies, cops, and crooks for a GURPS: Modern starter box...

[The Wrathchild]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Of course, this means that the purchaser ends up getting clobbered for currency conversion charges through their credit card, Paypal account, or whatever.

Well, that hasn't been to bad, at least around here - the numbers on the bank statement have been very close to what checking the official national bank exchange rate have suggested would be the price.

It's much worse that the dollar has strengthened some the last 6 months.

[walkir]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

Foreign sales of PDFs: I don't know! And I would like to. We'll see how well that is tracked.

When checking out, you have to enter your state (for the VAT I guess). Paypal doesn't check for nationality, but there' a "country" field in the credit card form. Unfortunately, the USA are set as default.
No idea if it's possible to check out with that form saying you're from the US and without choosing a state.

@david johansen: You mean like LEGO?

[duskblade]

I for one hope that Evil Ted falls under the other games your planing to pushing through the line finaly

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by walkir

But isn't "export" about selling stuff to foreign countries, physically crossing the border and coming into customs checks?

Not really, unless you choose to define the word that way. Economists and governments and suchlike tend to be more interested in whether something causes people in foreign countries to exchange their currency for yours in order to pay you for something. Some kinds of services used to get called "invisible exports"... And SJGames could reasonably say that e23 earns foreign currency for the USA, so who cares that all they're shipping is electrons?

Mind you, they then blow that by importing the services of me and Pulver and Kromm and Hans.

[GoodGame]

D'OH Sam Adams and reading threads complaining about PDF costs made me have a modest brainstorm. Why not extend the page count of Pyramid, but use that to sell advertising? Not a good idea to get it in the black????

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by GoodGame

D'OH Sam Adams and reading threads complaining about PDF costs made me have a modest brainstorm. Why not extend the page count of Pyramid, but use that to sell advertising? Not a good idea to get it in the black????

I suspect that they can make an issue grow or shrink, page-wise, as much as they want to. It's electronic, after all; setting it up with more virtual pages is free. Getting the stuff to fill those blank new pages in is a different issue, though. If there were people willing to pay for ads, they could put in as many as they wanted to without batting an eye. The real question is whether or not anyone's willing to pay for that space.